Run Away! Run Away!

On Sunday our outreach took us to the village of Simwanda where we visited a new congregation that has only been meeting for the past six weeks. The day was quite eventful, so I’m going to blog it in installments for the next two or three days.

We set out with nine people in our Land Rover. Peter was to translate and guide us to find the way. Rodwell would do the Lord’s Supper. Sylvester, a sponsored college student, was to help me with the children’s class. Four other women were going along to help with the singing.

I took our camera along, hoping to find some photo opportunities. We had been traveling about an hour when I saw two boys, each using a set of oxen to cultivate a maize field. I asked David to stop and I jumped out with my camera and headed toward the field. Suddenly one of the boys dropped the reins he was holding and bolted away, running as fast as he could away from me. Peter saw what was happening and shot out of the Land Rover and across the field to grab the reins before the oxen could run away. The boy, meanwhile, had run to hide behind a termite mound (a small hill). Peter said a few things to him in Chitonga while I snapped pictures. We headed back to the vehicle and the boy timidly came out and resumed his position behind the oxen.

Back in the Land Rover I quizzed Peter about what had happened. “Oh, he thought we were Satanists who were coming to cast a spell on him,” Peter explained. It seems that many rumors about Satanic acts are flying around this area. Peter assured him that we were Christians and not Satanists, and we assume he wasn’t too traumatized to continue.

On the way home, we stopped at a village to pick up a goat (watch for that blog in a couple of days). The runaway boy was there, seemingly unharmed, and he got a chance to see that we were not Satanic monsters to be feared. We all had a good laugh.